Like Stardust
by elzed
Summary: A musing on the sexual upheaval which Ryan Atwood unleashed on Newport. Everybody wants a piece of Ryan Atwood. No one gets any. Please R&R.


_**More of a drabble than a real story. A meditation on the sexual upheaval caused by Ryan Atwood's arrival in Newport. Everyone wants a piece of Ryan Atwood. No one gets any. One-shot.**_

**_Thanks to BonnieD for looking over it. _**

**_Constructive criticism and reviews appreciated. Actually I'd really like to know what anyone thinks about this because it started off different and developed into this hard-to-define thing._**

**_Disclaimer: Not mine. I wish. Fox's_**

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_**Like Stardust.**_

_Everybody's in lust with Ryan Atwood. It's like this ripple effect around him. And it leaves a shimmer behind, a distortion in the air. A haze of desire that settles on others nearby. It's quite a subtle thing, but it has consequences. Ever since Ryan turned up in Newport, things have been veering slightly off-course. Reality has shifted._

Take Seth. Before Ryan, he was Harbor's uber-geek. No friends, no flirts, certainly no girls. Mr Unpopular. Then the boy from Chino turns up and next thing you now Cohen's got two babes fighting over him. Real babes, including the girl he's been in love with since forever. What gives?

Call it the Ryan effect. Like a sprinkling of stardust has settled on Seth and suddenly he's become more... desirable. Sexier. An object of lust.

Of course, there's more to it than that. Seth may be attractive to women for the first time ever, but he's also discovered that he can get boy-crushes. Not quite like _that_, not consciously at any rate, but when Ryan's around he's gigglier and giddier than normal (and that's saying something). He looks out for him at all times – well, he's got Ryan's back and Ryan's got his. Seth desperately hopes some of Ryan's cool rubs off on him and is amazed when, effectively, it does. Just because Seth doesn't realise that Ryan's sex appeal is part of the deal doesn't mean it isn't. Just because he's never thought he could love a boy doesn't mean he doesn't. Brotherly? Perhaps. But when Ryan leaves for Chino, Seth's world collapses, as if the prop that held it all up had been whisked away. And even though Summer's still here when Ryan's gone, Seth can't handle it and has to run away. Ask yourself, who is it he loves most, really?

But it's not just Seth.

Marissa, now, that's an interesting one. She fell for the bad boy image before she ever knew Ryan, and yes, she wanted him. But when she had her chance, she wasn't ready to act on it. She was still smarting from having lost her virginity to the wrong guy. For all the wrong reasons, because she didn't really know about the right reasons. She would always have to get wasted before she'd do anything in bed. Until Ryan that is. He's the first guy who's actually made Marissa feel sexy. Not beautiful, or attractive, or popular – no, he makes her feel sexy. As in object of desire, but also capable of desire. And that's quite a new feeling for her.

She's never trusted her body, always treated it like something to be curbed, contained, moulded to her will. Desire is just another one of those needs to keep under control, like hunger. In fact, desire is altogether too much like hunger for Marissa to let herself go.

So even with Ryan it's lots of hot kisses and dry humping and hands pushed away when they get too close and personal. A battle is fought on her body for every inch, every privilege she concedes – even if deep down she wants to feel his fingers, his mouth, his tongue on her, in her. And they never quite make it to the sex, because she doesn't realise until it's too late that the battle was Luke's thing, a habit she fell into over the years, her resisting the conquest, but that actually what she craves is for Ryan to fuck her. Well, who wouldn't? By the time she's got that straight he's not that keen anymore. And she's left drinking vodka, and cursing fate, and Oliver, and Theresa when all she needed to do was take a good look at herself.

Summer, she's always known. She may have been a virgin when he turned up but she can tell a hot prospect a mile away, and given the opportunity, she would have surrendered her virginity to Chino in the bat of an eyelid. No questions asked, no strings attached. In her pink bedroom between aubergine sheets, without the awkwardness or the fumbling or the bruising of the stupid fish sex with Cohen (and Chino would have made her come first time, she bets). Or in an alley up against a wall, hot and sweaty and rough, his breath on her neck, maybe teeth, the wall hard against her back, urgent kisses and biting off cries into his shoulder as he brings her off with his fingers before pushing into her and stopping her whimpers with his mouth.

Just thinking of it, even now, makes her knees goes weak. Sometimes thoughts of Chino intrude when she's in bed with Cohen, and she closes her eyes and pretends that it's another tongue licking her, another hand touching her and she comes even harder. Mostly though she tries to forget it, because it's all about Seth, and Ryan has enough women on his ass as it is. But she does wonders what would've happened if he'd kissed her at that party when he first appeared on the Newport scene, and whether he'd still be there if they'd fucked then.

_Ryan walks oblivious through this web of desire. He has no idea of the way they see him, want him, need him. There's a trail of furtive glances and sighs and bit lips in his wake and he doesn't even notice. It's part of his charm really. He knows he's good with the ladies, as Seth would say, and he's never had a problem getting some. But he hasn't a clue that it goes far beyond that._

Do you think Anna left for Pittsburgh just because of Seth? Sure, being ditched for Summer hurt, even though Anna made sure she was doing the ditching before Seth got a chance. But Seth at least wanted her. Maybe not as much as he wanted Summer, but she'd felt him hard against her often enough to know there was real lust there.

Whereas Ryan – fuck him, he never saw her except as Seth's girl. Or his ex – to be pitied when Summer took her rightful place with Seth. He's never had the faintest idea that she's been fantasising about him – oh, ever since Cotillion really. Even though she was in love with Seth. Because Seth was a good kisser, but she always suspected Ryan was a good lay. Back in Pittsburgh, more often than not, it's not Newport she dreams of but Chino.

Luke – well, he's textbook. He's a jock and a jerk and a rival when they meet, the classic alpha male. Loudly heterosexual, aggressive, a bully. And here comes this little punk, sniffing around his girl, standing up for his whipping-boy. He loses both his outlets in one go, the girl he could mack on, the boy he could smack down. No wonder he's pissed.

Repressed? Luke? Why do _you_ think he freaked out so much when he found out his dad was gay – and Ryan was there? It's not so much a boy-crush like Seth, it's more of an accidental look in the showers after soccer practice that makes his dick twitch, and makes him cringe. An unbidden fantasy when he jacks off in the privacy of his bedroom. An urge to pound his fists into Atwood's face as a substitute for unmentionable – unthinkable, even – acts. And don't think it all went away when they became friends, either. He just tried to forget the urge, focus on the friendship, pretend it never happened. Put it this way: Julie's not the only one he ran away from when he hightailed it to Portland.

_Meanwhile Ryan broods, because he's good at it, and he doesn't get that it just makes him look that much sexier When he walks into a room, it's like he's turned up the volume to eleven. Suddenly the senses are sharpened. There's something about his presence that makes people more aware of their bodies, that makes the air crackle with electricity, turns the mundane erotic. Even among the parents' generation, the older ones, he's disturbing the order of things._

Julie Cooper for one. She's never been as rattled by anyone as she has by Ryan Atwood. Her marriage and her family are falling apart and still she finds that the single most annoying thing in her life is this juvenile delinquent who's wormed his way into her daughter's affections. She does not want Marissa hanging out with this piece of Chino trash. Hell, Chino spells trash even for the Riverside girl in her – let alone for the Newport Beach bitch. But if you asked her to put her finger on it she wouldn't know why she's so angry. Except that after Jimmy the wimp and Caleb the sugar-daddy she can't help but lust after a brooding bad boy with a buff body, rippling abs and pecs to die for. Shallow? Hell yes. She won't admit it to herself, even in her most private moments, but she's pissed because she wants Ryan for herself. And she can't have him. So she settles for Luke. Funny thing is, she doesn't realise he's fucking her for exactly the same reason.

As for Kirsten's sister Hailey – please. If Ryan hadn't been Kirsten's foster-son she'd have put the moves on him good and proper. That first night, when she saw him in the poolhouse, she was already giving him the once-over. She briefly wondered whether she'd done the wrong thing sending him off to the living-room couch. After that, well, she had to cool it. There's a limit to what Kirsten will put up with even from her hellraising baby sister. But she hasn't forgotten the vibe. Oh no. She still sleeps in his wifebeater sometimes.

Even Sandy and Kirsten are feeling the Ryan effect. No, they aren't incestuously lusting after him – although Kirsten couldn't help but notice the ripped arms, the shoulders, the tough-guy hard muscle that Sandy so conspicuously lacks, when Ryan first turned up. But the sex quota in the Cohen household went way up after Ryan arrived – and, if pressed, neither Sandy nor Kirsten would be able to tell you exactly why. Truth is, that first time, Kirsten felt the raw sexuality emanating from him. Since then, she's been trying to forget. So Sandy got plenty. Still does. The Ryan effect, it's long lasting.

_Even now, that Ryan's left Newport, it lingers. And still he has no idea._

Theresa has to deal with it now. Poor Theresa. She's carried a torch for Ryan ever since he was her first all those years ago. She came to Newport because one look from him does more to her than Eddie's best efforts at foreplay. He only has to glance at her and she'll open her arms, her legs and her heart to him. And even though she's scared to death of the coming baby, and of the direction her life's taken, still she's thankful sometimes because it means Ryan's back in Chino, back with her where he belongs. And it's only a matter of time, she promises herself, before he finds his way back into her bed and into her body

But sometimes when she wakes up in the middle of the night to pee and he's sleeping in the other room she feels the frustration mounting. She looks at her full breasts, the gentle swell of her belly, the way her body broadcasts her blossoming pregnancy, and she feels she's drying up inside. She can almost hear the blood coursing through her veins, pulsing, her heart beating faster, stronger, the life growing in her.

She wants sex like she never has before, with a hormonally-heightened intensity and it kills her that the object of her desire is sleeping a few feet away but might as well be at the other end of the world for all the notice he gives her. She craves his touch, his smell, the sound of his voice, his eyes. She wants to taste him in her mouth, god she'd kill for the taste of him right now. During the day, she'll brush against him now and then, almost inadvertently, and he never lets it linger. Every time it feels like a rejection, a kick to the gut. She wants to climb into his bed, right now, reach into his boxers and make him hard, make him fuck her like she knows how but even then she fears he might push her away. Even though she knows he's not had any for months and hears him sometimes through the thin walls jerking off, despite his best efforts at staying quiet. She doesn't dare upset the fragile balance of their life. She wills herself to be patient, to wait for the moment that must happen, she promises herself. And goes back to her empty bed and touches herself desperately, thinking of his fingers and his lips and his dick, until she comes with a sob.

_That much, Ryan knows_.


End file.
